11
2012
Thai Time, Randwick, Sydney
Liss
Ginger’s mum was a rodeo rider.
Juno was born June in bland suburbia but craved more drama.
Dani’s family never forgave her for marrying a Frenchman in New York City.
And Sadie’s mother poisoned her father.
These were the stories Liss didn’t know about her new friends until they were spread across the table at an average Thai restaurant, next to green chicken curry, jasmine rice in a tarnished silver dish and a plate of slowly congealing satay sticks.
Liss had arrived at the high-street restaurant with a classy bottle of pink wine in hand that she had no intention of drinking. She was pregnant again.
This wasn’t the baby she had so confidently announced at the first birthday party. That unknowable little person didn’t stay.
It had all seemed too easy at the time, but photos of that day in Centennial Park were hard to look at, knowing what came next. Two more weeks, then the blood. Then the tears. Then the emptiness.
Now here she was again at that precarious early stage, carrying herself carefully in fear of scaring off whatever was quietly unfurling inside her.
Babies were everywhere. Ginger was heavily pregnant. Sadie, for God’s sake, was having Jacob’s baby, much to his confusion. Liss’s sister-in-law Piper was having her third, which just seemed greedy. Lachy was impatient, both with her sadness and at her inability to make another baby happen. He’d spent a day stroking her hair after the last little-big loss, before asking her when they could try again.
Dani met Liss outside the restaurant in her work clothes – a silk shirt and tailored pants, the kind of things no sane person would wear around a two-year-old. She looked at the bottle in her friend’s hand and pulled her into a hug.
‘This one’s the one,’ she said. ‘If my grandmother was here, she’d say she could sense it.’
‘Like a disturbance in the force?’
‘You’re getting your folklores muddled.’
‘Sorry. We had no culture on the North Shore.’ Liss squeezed Dani’s hand. It was a wet night and the cars swooshed loudly as they passed, casting orange and red light on the slick black road. There were tiny dark spots of rain on Dani’s green silk shirt.
‘How’s Seb?’
Dani shook her head. ‘I haven’t been home,’ she said. ‘I assume he’s fine.’
That wasn’t what Liss was asking and they both knew it. But this was not the time.
Inside, Sadie and Juno had already decided on what everyone would eat. Sadie’s well-established baby belly was draped in some sort of silky gold dress that only someone who didn’t get out much would wear to a Tuesday night dinner. She was declaring her baby ‘baked enough’ to be pouring a glass of Juno’s sauvignon blanc for herself.
Ginger arrived just after Dani and Liss squeezed into their seats, the curve of Ginger’s own almost-baked baby in a floaty cheesecloth number Liss had seen on sale in Tree of Life when she’d been pushing Tia through Bondi Junction the other week.
Just like Liss, and unlike the others, Ginger hadn’t been working since James was born. But unlike Liss, it was making her poor. The word was that Ginger and Aiden were talking about moving out of the eastern suburbs, and Liss wasn’t surprised. They were pretending, really, that a teacher and a nurse could live here. It was just doable for two people without children on an ordinary double income. Impossible for two people who urgently needed another bedroom, especially when one of them was about to be busy with the unpaid work of breastfeeding.
Still, you’re so lucky, Liss thought, looking at Ginger’s ringed eyes and wide smile. You and Sadie sitting there stroking the babies that are reassuringly rolling around inside you. You have problems I don’t have, but you have that. Conscious that this thought was troubled in about five different ways, Liss gulped her fizzy water and smiled around the table.
Moneybags and spring rolls were delivered – Liss knew better than to resist the fixed-price banquet with this group of friends – and Juno made an announcement. ‘So my father died on Thursday,’ she said, dipping crispy pastry into neon-pink sweet chilli sauce. ‘And I’m not flying home for the funeral.’
Liss swallowed, blinked. ‘I didn’t know you had a father,’ she said, and immediately internally shushed herself as Dani shot her a raised eyebrow.
‘We all have fathers,’ Juno said, still chewing.
‘I don’t,’ said Sadie.
‘Me neither,’ said Ginger.
‘You do all have fathers,’ Juno pushed on. ‘Dead or alive, they exist.’
‘Does Bob have a father?’ Sadie asked, sipping on her controversial wine.
‘Fuck off, Sadie.’ But Juno was smiling.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Dani said, reaching over the spring rolls to put her hand on Juno’s hand.
‘Ah.’ For a moment Juno looked wild. ‘It’s okay. He was an asshole.’
‘What level of arsehole are we talking?’ asked Ginger.
‘Regulation-issue asshole. All-American man. Outdoorsy. Intolerant. Dull, really. My sister is telling me not going back is borderline abusive to my mom but, you know, I don’t think she liked him much, either.’
‘Your mum?’
‘Yeah, I think she’ll be okay. Emily and I were planning on taking Bob next winter, when we’re a bit straighter with the cash and,’ Juno was looking down and turning a spring roll around in her fingers, ‘I think Mom might need us more then, when all the pies have stopped turning up.’
‘It’s hard, being far,’ Dani said.
Juno shook her head slightly, blew out through her mouth. ‘We don’t talk about our families. Like, our original families. I think it’s time for the stories about all the dead dads.’
‘And dead mums?’ Liss, already sitting in her anxious envy over her friends’ well-established bumps, couldn’t help herself. She realised that for all they did know about each other, through those midnight messages and hormonal tears and terrifying, up-ending, giddy early baby days, their own back stories were not much discussed.
Juno, of course, began.
The wild north-west coast of the States.
Everything grand-scale and rain-washed, apart from her suburban three-bed on a symmetrical new development in the shadow of mountains.
Her dad didn’t talk much, other than to complain about being in a house full of women.
Her mother was in real estate, practical, driven, tidy.
Juno was different from both of them.
Dreamy.
Creative.
Growing up, she wanted to be a writer.
She got into college in LA, stayed, changed her name – ‘I was just plain June but I wanted to be more interesting’ – got a job as a publisher’s assistant and met an Australian screenwriter called Agnetha – yes, like ABBA – who was so bewitching Juno followed her all the way to Sydney, where she got a job with a literary agent and where Agnetha broke her heart by starting to sleep with men, ‘awful ones, too’.
The split was long, drawn out, messy, and Juno decided to go home.
The night before her flight, she was tempted out to a bar in Erskineville and she met Emily.
Beautiful, solid Emily. ‘I fell fast, I always do. But this time it stuck.’ She didn’t get on the plane.
Liss wasn’t expecting much from Ginger’s story, if she was honest.
Ginger had always been a side character in Liss’s mothers’ group world.
At first, just quiet and very, very tired.
Liss had never found herself wondering about Ginger’s life, the way she had about Sadie’s.
Ginger, she suspected, was dull.
Liss was wrong.
Ginger was originally from the country. Not the kind of country with green rolling hills and a quaint bakery serving artisan bread, but the kind of country where ‘town’ was an hour away and ‘school’ was a shortwave radio.
Her mother had been a rodeo rider in the 1980s. This information caused the whole table to pause, mid satay stick, for exclamation. Ginger’s mum had learned from her own dad, who died of a broken neck in exactly the manner you’d expect. Ginger’s parents trained horses to do tricks and travelled the dusty, boozy show route with the babies under their arms. Ginger was named with the circuit in mind, and could stand up on the back of a galloping pony by the time she was nine.
‘Stop it.’ Liss was open-mouthed. She considered the pony her father had bought her after her mother’s death. Anatole had lived in stables at Centennial Park and been taken out for a trot once a day. ‘That’s wild.’
‘It was wild.’ Ginger nodded, rubbing her bump. ‘And then it got sad.’
Her mother fell from a horse when she was teaching a teenage boy how to perform a trick called a spritz stand. Google it, Ginger said, it’s hard. She broke her back.
It was, Ginger went on in the quiet but authoritative voice that Liss had finally begun to hear, the defining moment of her childhood. Her mother, needing full-time care and not getting it, drank. Her father, who’d always been a selfish prick, left. Ginger and her brother tried to keep things going in their little home in the middle of nowhere until a grandmother took them to live with her in the nearest actual town.
Her mother never really recovered. Her father never came back, and the moment Ginger turned sixteen she left that town, with its smell of woodsmoke and stale beer set deep in her skin. A teacher had insisted this wild little girl was smart, so she got a job in a racecourse stables, took herself to TAFE, became a nurse and, as soon as she started getting paid an actual wage, never looked at a horse again.
‘Horses hate us,’ she said, plucking up a fishcake with her fork.
Liss thought about Anatole, whose mane she loved to brush and whose neck she loved to nuzzle. She had always fed her pony sugar cubes. And then one day, Anatole nipped her. It was best not to mention it.
The table erupted in questions and Liss considered Ginger with a new wonder. An entirely self-created, capable creature, formed under extreme pressure. Where were the hints of this person? In the few words first spoken? In that purposeful, slightly heavy-footed walk? In the way her hair could look a bit like an unkempt shrub?
‘It’s your turn, Liss,’ insisted Juno as the mains rolled out.
Liss felt a deep burn of discomfort.
‘No rodeo riders here,’ she almost giggled, mortified at herself as she heard it bubble from her mouth. ‘Boring Sydney story.’
‘Not boring,’ Dani said. ‘Go on.’
Liss pushed some plain rice around on her plate and drew some broad strokes.
North Shore. Money on both sides but more from her mother, who came to Sydney from London, where she’d met Liss’s father at a 1970s arty party. That’s what she called it, when she’d tell Liss the story of meeting this confident Australian, a dealer not a painter, but a man moving through a world she’d wanted to join, with her own tiny little paintings that brought her joy. Liss’s mother was from properly posh people, with generations of owning things: mills, land, people. But she was wild, and loved the idea of an adventure on the other side of the world.
They set up home in Liss’s father’s grand house and, as Liss told it at Thai Time, the next chapters unfolded quickly – two baby boys and her, then the illness, the death, her teenage rebellions under the eyes of new stepmothers. Liss pushing away expectations of an art history degree and a gallery job that was really just a husband waiting room and leaving to travel. She came back, met Lachy, moved east . . . The rest, they knew. Please pass the satay.
But her friends had questions they had been waiting to ask.
‘Did you ever have a job?’
‘I did teacher training.’ Liss felt a little embarrassed to admit the number of times she’d started things and abandoned them, including her teaching career, which had lasted a week’s placement in a school too many suburbs away.
‘Did you marry Lachy for the money?’
‘Quite the opposite.’
‘He married you for your money?’
Dani shifted in her seat. ‘Pass the sweet chilli please, Sadie.’
‘Not exactly. But my mother left me some.’
‘How much is some?’
‘Sadie!’
‘Enough to not have to have a job, if I didn’t want one.’ A ripple of wonder around the table, as if that were as unusual as being able to stand on the back of a galloping horse. Perhaps it was.
The truth was that Liss’s mother, at the point when she was sick enough to know it mattered, but not too sick to make her wishes plain, had explicitly stated in tight legal language that she wanted the lion’s share of her own inheritance to go to her daughter. In less legal language, she’d told a confused young Liss that she didn’t want her Alyssia to ever have to rely on a man for money. It was a strange, barbed blessing. An assumption, perhaps, that the boys could make their own way but her girl could not.
Still, Liss had come to understand that her mother had meant it as a shield. And she’d known that the men in her family would be much too proud to ever challenge it. And so it was.
‘But how much?’
‘Enough.’ Dani pushed a plate of pad thai towards Sadie. ‘Have some noodles.’
‘I’ve never had a rich friend before.’ Ginger laughed. ‘You have to excuse us.’
Liss’s face tingled with pink. She couldn’t lift her eyes off the table. This was why, she knew Lachy would say, you should have gone private.
Dani started to talk, Liss was almost certain, to save her from having to say any more.
Dani told the table about her outer suburbs upbringing, of the pressure of being the eldest daughter. How hard she tried at everything – school, chores, sport – and how it somehow made her more disappointing to her parents than her sisters who didn’t even bother. How she struggled to feel like she belonged in this close but critical family. So much so that when she left uni and got into the graduate program at a bank in the city, she chose the one with the option to send her overseas. She thought her parents would be proud. They weren’t. Why was she always running away from them? For eight whole years she lived on the other side of the world in New York City. She loved it, she hated it; it was a challenge and a stress and it was complete freedom. Dani came home with a French husband and a baby in her belly, and her parents were still barely speaking to her about it.
‘But isn’t that what they wanted for you?’ Juno was confused.
‘I did it wrong,’ Dani said. ‘Seb was a stranger to them and they were furious at me for getting married in New York. They still are. Although Lyra’s hard to resist.’ She smiled, sipped. ‘That’s me.’
Liss watched all heads turn to Sadie. Alongside the smell of lemongrass and coconut milk, anticipation was hanging over the table. They all wanted to hear the story of the woman who went to mothers’ group without a child, who decided to dump her partner while she was pregnant, who draped her baby bump in gold lamé as she sipped sav blanc.
‘My story’s so boring,’ she said, drawing a heart in spilled water on the table with a pink-tipped finger.
‘I bet it is not,’ said Juno, leaning in.
Sadie grew up just a couple of suburbs south, she said. Her father was a local politician. Dani, clearly more across news than Liss was, nodded at the mention of his name.
Sadie’s dad was a pillar of the community with something on every night – a shop opening, local businesses awards, a fundraiser. As Sadie spoke, Liss saw another layer of recognition crossing Dani’s face. Oh.
‘Yes, that’s him,’ Sadie said, noticing Dani’s expression.
Sadie’s mother was at home. A 1950s housewife in 1980s Sydney suburbia. It was all mornings by the pool, home-made pies and lipstick on at 5 pm. She accompanied her husband to most things, children allowing, in a rotation of beautiful dresses. Many of Sadie’s early memories were of lying on her mother’s bed, watching her get overdressed. She’d come home in a fug of perfume and gin and kiss Sadie and her little brother before they went to sleep. Sadie would usually wake to hear her father coming in much, much later, and her mother offering him some saved dinner, or a hot cocoa, because she knew it would help him sleep.
Her mum seemed to make so much effort for her father, little Sadie thought it was like she lived only for him. Which was why, when it became clear that the upstanding local MP’s evenings away from home involved too much alcohol and several affairs with several other women in his district, Sadie’s mum did something extreme.
‘She made him a pie,’ Dani said. ‘I remember the story.’
On that particular night, Sadie and her brother were sent to a neighbour, highly unusual but quite the adventure. She remembered that her little overnight bag was shaped like a woolly lamb, and you unzipped its fluffy stomach to reveal your pyjamas and toothbrush. And while they were a few doors down, being indulged with after-dinner TV and extra ice cream for dessert, Sadie’s mum made a very special meal for her husband.
One that would see her in court, charged with baking a pie that contained poisonous mushrooms. One that would see her charged with attempted murder.
Liss was sure her mouth was hanging open. ‘Your mother killed your father?’
‘Not quite,’ said Sadie. ‘He wouldn’t die. But he went to hospital and never really came out, and she went to jail and then got sick so also never really came out, and that was the end of our childhood.’
Ginger was the one who put a hand over Sadie’s, next to the banana leaf piled high with jasmine rice.
‘Anyway.’ Sadie drained her glass and smiled. ‘I don’t suffer fools. And I don’t trust easily and,’ she looked around the table with a playful glare, ‘you don’t want to cross me.’ She laughed, but it was high-pitched, hollow.
‘What happened to you and your brother?’ Dani asked.
‘We went into foster care for a while,’ said Sadie. ‘Until my mum’s sister came back from overseas and decided to take us in. I have to tell you, I was the best-behaved teenager on the planet. I knew what the women in that family did to you if you betrayed them.’ Again, a laugh. ‘So we spent the last few years out at Richmond.’
‘And the by-election called because your dad was incapacitated won the next prime minister his seat,’ said Dani. ‘So, you know, your mum changed history.’
‘Yeah, and died of breast cancer.’ Sadie filled her glass again. ‘Karma, I guess.’
‘What happened to your dad?’
‘This life story has gone on for too long,’ Sadie declared. ‘Why’s there no egg fried rice at this place?’
It’s Thai, Liss couldn’t help but correct, in her head. Not Chinese.
Nobody knew what to say for a moment. They just looked at their food and then at the rain through the huge, rattling window. It was coming down harder now, in that determined way Sydney rain has of getting it over with.
Dani squeezed Liss’s hand under the table.
‘Is it nice to be the boring one for once?’ she whispered, with a grin.
Liss returned the squeeze. These women, walking around with all their big and small stories, with a mess of reasons for wanting to build a family beyond their own.
She sipped her water and took a mouthful of rice and felt a twinge she chose to ignore. Because what else could you do?
When Liss got home that night she found a splash of scarlet blood in her underwear. She put a pad in her pants, swallowed two Nurofen and went to her daughter’s bed, climbing in and curling into a comma around Tia’s tiny back. She felt the soft soles of her daughter’s feet pressed against her thighs and breathed in her soapy smell. She lay there all night, in and out of something close to sleep, feeling the possibility of a new life slipping away, and conjuring women who could stand tall on the backs of horses and bake poisonous pies.